Geoff Dyer - The Missing of the Somme

Reality recedes with each ‘as’ until the final heartfelt declaration can barely sustain the weight of its own conviction. Even moments of extreme personal danger are rendered secure and comfortable by the familiar conventions by which they are expressed. ‘Terrified, I clawed the stinking mud as the bullet whistled round my head and shoulders and I waited for death.’ The whole war is compressed into a single cliché.

In The Bloody Game (another Sassoon-derived title) Fussell mentions that some have considered Hiscock’s memoir ‘not as factually accurate as it pretends to be’. Whether it is a true account is not the issue here. What is important is that, for Hiscock, the linguistic and thematic conventions of the genre are more powerful than the original experience; indeed the original experience can only be revealed by the accretion of clichés it is buried beneath. The homely crudity of Hiscock’s language makes him more — not less — susceptible to mediated expression. A lack of linguistic self-consciousness exacerbates the tendency to express the experience of war through the words of others. Hiscock unwittingly acknowledges this when, as a way of adding resonance to an incident, he concludes by observing ‘if that wasn’t a theme for Siegfried Sassoon, I don’t know what was’. In terms of the writing that results from his experiences Hiscock may as well not have participated personally in the events of his own story.

The problems built in to Hill’s naturalist novel and Hiscock’s memoir disappear in a book like Timothy Findley’s The Wars , which heightens the linguistic and narrative strategies on which it depends. The problem of mediation is resolved by accentuating it. The novel’s superb setpieces — in which the protagonist Lieutenant Ross shoots an injured horse in the hold of the troopship, becomes lost in Flanders fog, or shelters from a gas attack — seem wholly authentic because Findley avails himself of the full range of narrative gambits which have become available in the years since the war. Hill’s characteristic register is a vaguely twenties literary English; Findley’s jagged self-enhancing fragments anticipate the technique of Michael Ondaatje’s Second World War novel, The English Patient . Ross’s sensations are recorded with a linguistic resourcefulness that is nowhere achieved in the memoirs. After a deafening barrage, to pick the tiniest of examples, Ross’s ‘ears popped and the silence poured in’.

The structure of the book incorporates and depends on the research that has gone into its writing: transcripts of interviews, letters, old photographs. . ‘What you people who weren’t yet born can never know,’ reads one such transcription,

is what it meant to sleep under silent falls of snow when all night long the only sounds you heard were dogs that barked at trains that passed so far away they took a short cut through your dreams and no one even awoke. It was the War that changed all that. It was. After the Great War for Civilization — sleep was different everywhere. .

Findley moves, often within the space of a couple of paragraphs, from the contingencies of a moment-by-moment present tense to the vast historical overview. Instead of an imaginative leap into the trenches, in other words, he enters the time of photographs. Sometimes, when there is no ‘good picture available except the one you can make in your mind’, present and past, description and speculation resolve into each other. The staple tropes of the front are reinvented:

The mud. There are no good similes. Mud must be a Flemish word. Mud was invented here. Mudland might have been its name. The ground is the colour of steel. Over most of the plain there isn’t a trace of topsoil: only sand and clay. The Belgians call them ‘clyttes’, these fields, and the further you go towards the sea, the worse the clyttes become. In them, the water is reached by the plough at an average depth of eighteen inches. When it rains (which is almost constantly from early September through to March, except when it snows) the water rises at you out of the ground. It rises from your footprints — and an army marching over a field can cause a flood. In 1916, it was said that you ‘waded to the front’. Men and horses sank from sight. They drowned in mud. Their graves, it seemed, just dug themselves and pulled them down.

No eyewitness account is more evocative than this, precisely because Findley acknowledges that the most vivid feature of the Great War is that it took place in the past.

It therefore takes an effort of considerable historical will to remember that before the war Thiepval, Auchonvillers and Beaumont-Hamel were just places like any others, that the Somme was a pleasant river in the département of the same name. But in 1910, in Faulks’ Birdsong , when Stephen Wraysford arrives at Amiens, that is all it is, a place — where he falls for the wife of the local factory-owner with whom he is lodging. They are consumed by passion, but brooding over the doomed love affair is the greater doom that will soon consume the earth beneath their feet.

In the course of their outings they see ‘a small train waiting to take the branch line into Albert and Bapaume’. A second train takes them ‘from Albert out along the small country line beside the Ancre, past the villages of Mesnil and Hamel to the station at Beaumont’. Another pushes its way south ‘where the Marne joined the river Meuse, whose course linked Sedan to Verdun’: a network of innocent connections that will soon define the geography of the Western Front. In Amiens Cathedral Stephen has a vision of the ‘terrible piling up of the dead’ of centuries, which is also a premonition of what is to come. On oppressive, sultry afternoons husband, wife and lover go punting in the stagnant backwaters of the Somme. Thiepval is a spot to take afternoon tea. The future presses on the lovers like the dead weight of geological strata. The Great War took place in the past — even when it lay in the future.

To us it always took place in the past.

The issue of mediation has been compounded by Paul Fussell, who I am reading again as preparation for our trip to Flanders. If it was impossible to write about the war except through Owen’s and Sassoon’s eyes, it is now difficult to read about it except through the filter of Fussell’s ground-breaking investigation and collation of its dominant themes. Whenever we read the war poets, we effectively borrow Fussell’s copies to do so and — even when we dissent from his judgements — cannot ignore his annotations and underlinings. Fussell has himself become a part of the process whereby the memory of the war becomes lodged in the present. His commentary has become a part of the testimony it comments on. (Reading him — or anyone else for that matter — I am searching for what is not there , for what is missing, for what remains to be said.) If Hill’s Strange Meeting is an example of primary mediation, then The Great War and Modern Memory raises the possibility of secondary or critical mediation.

Even the ceremonies of Remembrance are subject to mediation. Now that the two world wars are commemorated with a service at the Cenotaph on the Sunday closest to the eleventh of November, it is — as the term Remembrance Day suggests — the act of remembering together that is being remembered. Contemporary works like A Twentieth-Century Memorial by Michael Sandle (born in 1936) — a skeletal Mickey Mouse manning, or mousing , a bronze machine-gun — are memorials to the near extinction of the war memorial as a viable form of public sculpture.

And this book? Like the youthful Christopher Isherwood who wanted to write a novel entitled ‘A War Memorial’, I wanted to write a book that was not about ‘the War itself but the effect of the idea of [the War] on my generation’. Not a novel but an essay in mediation: research notes for a Great War novel I had no intention of writing, the themes of a novel without its substance. .